EDITORIAL: Mexico is not a failed state or a threat, despite what Trump says

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Bret Stephens a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s and Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary in 2013, published an article stating that America’s neighbor isn’t a failed state or a threat—despite what Donald Trump says.

A dozen Mexican states held elections on Sunday June 5, and—ho-hum—the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, appears to have won seven of the races. The Journal reports that voters in the world’s 15th-largest economy were turned off by the ruling party’s failure to cut debt and tackle crime, and by a boy-wonder president, Enrique Peña Nieto, whom they now regard as more boy than wonder.

PHOTO: THE DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES

I mention this to illustrate that Mexico is a functioning democracy whose voters tend to favor pro-business conservatives, not a North American version of Libya, exporting jihad and boat people to its neighbors. Somebody ought to explain this to Republican voters, whose brains, like pickles in brine, have marinated too long in anti-Mexican nonsense.

Elements of that nonsense:

• Mexico is a failed state. Mexico’s struggles with drug cartels—whose existence is almost entirely a function of America’s appetite for dope—are serious and well known. So are its deep-seated institutional weaknesses, especially the police forces that collude with the cartels and terrorize rural areas.

Then again, Mexico’s 2014 homicide rate of about 16 murders per 100,000 means that it is about as dangerous as Philadelphia (15.9) and considerably safer than Miami (19.2) or Atlanta (20.5). Are these “failed cities” that you don’t dare visit and that should be walled off from the rest of America? …